CENTENNIAL DIGITAL Jamaica, one of two new mobile phone players likely to start offering mobile phone service early next year, could be about to strike a deal with monopoly Cable & Wireless Jamaica to use some of its signal towers.
Centennial's senior vice-president and chief financial officer speaking to Wednesday Business from San Juan, Puerto Rico said: "CDJ expects to offer Jamaica a superb state of the art digital wireless service. We are engaged in vendor selection on the network side which will provide Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). We have a preference for using existing signal towers which will most likely be those of Cable & Wireless(Jamaica) and some of the local radio stations. A short list has been drawn of candidates likely to fill senior management positions and a decision is likely to be made soon."
Industry sources suggested that CDJ was in discussions with C&W with a view to using some of its towers. The company's network vendor is likely to be a four horse race between Lucent, Nortel, Erickson and Nokia, with Nortel being the early front runner.
Irish telecoms company, Mossel, the other successful bidder at the auction for the cellular licences held late last year, has agreed to pay US$47.5 million. The other was Paradise Wireless (Jamaica), a subsidiary of Bahamas based Cellular One Caribbean who paid US$45 million for its licence. CDJ acquired a 51 per cent stake in Paradise in May of this year.
Cable & Wireless (Jamaica) uses the TDMA platform popular in the States, while Mossel will use GSM, favoured by European firms as the technology of the future.
CDJ will use CDMA, which will mean that customers will have to buy a new phone whenever they switch between the three mobile phone players. Verizon, the biggest wireless company in the US, formed out of a merger between Bell Atlantic and GTE Corp in June of this year, uses the CDMA network platform. Verizon has 26 million customers.
Cable & Wireless recently said it will have an all digital network by the start of December. The decision means that 43,000 existing C&W mobile customers now have to decide whether to buy a new phone by the end of November or wait for the new entrants to come on stream.
Although the three platforms will be different and customers will need a different phone to be hooked up to each network, customers should not have a problem calling friends using a different carrier.
Mossel is expecting the first consignment of 100 signal towers to arrive this week and will announce the winner of a tender bid to erect them and place them all over the island.
